Remove words from macOS spell check dictionary

I accidentally added an incorrectly spelt word to the macOS spelling dictionary via an Add to Dictionary menu item. Surprisingly, there was no inverse “remove from dictionary” option to undo this! Additionally, I realized there is no System Preferences page to to edit the custom dictionary. There are two ways to fix this with macOS (but none for iOS). ...

20 Feb 2022

Shortcut to convert image format and paste - redux

I was not satisfied with my last macOS Shortcut to convert image format and paste. The simple version forced me to choose between PNG and JPEG, and the complex version was too slow - specifically, the Find All Windows action. So here we go again… ...

11 Feb 2022

Compiling emf2svg

I recently wanted to convert an Windows Enhanced Metafile (EMF) to SVG. I used an open source conversion library called libemf2svg by Carpentier Pierre-Francois (Kakwa). ...

4 Feb 2022

My macOS Shortcut to Tile Windows

In the macOS Monterey Shortcuts Gallery, there are Shortcuts to “Tile Last 2 Windows”, “Tile Last 3 Windows” and “Tile Last 4 Windows”. This is my single combined version for any window (not just the last x). ...

19 Nov 2021

Shortcut to convert image format and paste

I have a hangup about Microsoft Office on macOS - it often elects to paste images from the clipboard in TIFF format, instead of PNG or JPG, which results in massive files, be it PowerPoint .PPTX presentations, Word .DOCX documents or Excel .XLSX spreadsheets. Enter: A new macOS Shortcut to convert clipboard images to (lossless) PNG or (lossy) JPG. ...

13 Nov 2021

Extract Text from a Screenshot with Shortcuts

Here is a macOS Shortcut to take a screenshot and extract text from it using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). I find this useful to copy text from e.g. a presentation or video during a virtual call, etc. ...

2 Nov 2021

Enable the Globe key on external keyboards for iPad

If you use an external keyboard on iPad, this is the most important thing to do - remap a key like the fn key to the globe 🌐 key. Here is how I do it for an older Apple wireless keyboard like the second generation A1255 or third generation A1314. ...

16 Oct 2021

Minuscule Lima setup to replace Docker on macOS

Today’s post will be a long one - recently, Docker announced some changes to the Docker Desktop license, so I figured I’d check out the Lima for macOS instead. As always, I end up complicating things by doing everything my way… ...

7 Oct 2021

New SF Symbols for VS Code Touch Bar

A few posts back, I described my no-code approach to customizing my MacBook touch bar in Visual Studio Code, where I used Apple’s SF Symbols 3 Beta icon library. Now, Apple has release a new beta of SF Symbols that makes the process easier! ...

24 Sep 2021

Viewing man pages in Preview or VS Code

I stumbled upon a post entitled “Piping stdout and stderr to Preview” by Erica Sadun - the cool bit that caught my attention was about redirecting man pages (UNIX help) to Preview on macOS. But this got me thinking… to redirect the output to Visual Studio Code instead! ...

6 Sep 2021